


Honeysuckle: A loose woman's guide to South Carolina

by aster_risk



Category: The X-Files
Genre: 50 States Challenge, 50 States of Sex, A Map of Us, Don't try this at home kids, F/M, Questionable sexual hygiene practices, Season 7 - whenever you headcanon they get their romantic shit together, South Carolina, and by that I mean sex in a motel pool, season of secret sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-21
Updated: 2018-08-21
Packaged: 2019-06-30 11:37:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,215
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15750888
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aster_risk/pseuds/aster_risk
Summary: Mulder and Scully make excellent use of their hotel swimming pool whilst on a case in a small South Carolina town. Written for the “A Map of Us: 50 States of Sex” challenge.





	Honeysuckle: A loose woman's guide to South Carolina

**Author's Note:**

> A lengthy disclaimer:
> 
> In addition—while Inman is a very real town, this is not an accurate description of the place. I loosely based this version of Inman on a similar South Carolina town, which I’ll not name here. It is a quaint place in which my lesbian ass is probably less then welcome, if the angry church signs I saw last time I visited are any indication. But this fic contains some of my favorite parts of the South Carolina of my youth— strange, nowhere-near-the-beach part of it where I spent ye days of yore. 
> 
> For the record, Duck is based (very loosely) on a fascinating neighbor who died when I was young at an age I still can’t comprehend. The railroad shack is also a real thing, an isolated little fruitstand slash gas station off the side of an old but still-working train track. It sells boiled peanuts, figs, and honey sticks. Lawson’s Wood is also inspired by but not necessarily based on a real place. The Rosewood is not. 
> 
> And lastly, if you’ve never experienced a South Carolina fig season, you are missing out.

It was fig season. They bumbled down one-way streets, squishing figs in a yellow rental Volkswagen beetle—puttering, pastel, banana-yellow, affectionately referred to by the fruitstand cashier as a “funny little bug.”

 

Mulder popped a fig into his mouth from the paper casing, bursting it whole against his front teeth and wiggling his eyebrows. The cashier—a burly, mutton-chopped man with a Southern drawl thicker than molasses—grinned as he handed them their change, with two hot honey-sticks “to suck on for your drive.” Funny how a building of federal agents hadn’t realized that the basement Spookies were finally fucking, but a nosy stranger in Inman, South Carolina knew what was up before they had a chance to blush.     

 

“Do you by any chance know where Lawson’s Wood is?” Mulder asked him.

 

The man smiled into his cobweb wrinkles. “Take the first left past the cemetery; drive down Mulberry Road ‘til you see the Citco station, and then make a right. You’ll see the entrance. It’s a mighty nice cycling path. Say—” he pauses to scratch his upper lip stubble— “whaddo a couple of out-of-towners see in Inman, anyway? Pardon my asking, but this ain’t a town folks just  _visit_.”

 

Before she could stop him, Mulder answered with a straight face, “ghosts, reportedly.”

 

He watched them—pale skin against black eyes, dolls’ pupils darker the tar pools dredged for prehistoric bones. Was he suspicious, paranoid? Maybe. Or perhaps he was simply chewing his third wad of tobacco, making small talk with the odd couple who walked into his rail side fruitstand.

 

Then he cackled. “Ghosts, huh?  _Ghosts!_  Y’all must be those ghost hunters on television, with all their fancy gadgets and thingamabobs. Me, I think all that ghost business is a load of poppycock, but I’ll tell ya—if you want to hear about the spirits of Lawson’s Wood, you oughta talk to old Mrs. Mortimer.” He snatched a piece of paper off the counter and scribbled on it. “Here’s her room in the County Hospital. She’ll love having visitors.”

 

Mulder cocked his head and shot her a look of pleasant surprise. She shrugged. She supposed Inman was the type of town where everyone knew everyone else’s business, either a great or horrible place to conduct an investigation, depending on how willing the residents were to keep each other’s dirty secrets. After all, they’d come at the behest of the coroner, an old pathologist with friends high in the Bureau—suspicious deaths in the woods were a Spooky specialty.

 

“One more thing, Mister…” Mulder trailed off.

 

“Call me Duck,” said the attendant. “I reckon I’ll be seeing the two of you again. I know everything and everyone from here to Greenville.”       

 

“In that case, Duck,” Scully cut in, “could you tell us where to find the Rosewood Motel?”

 

As they left the fruitstand, the screen door bouncing against its hinges, Scully breathed in a final taste of figs and boiled peanuts. On the edge of the parking lot, the grass grew to her knees, batting against her skirt. Honeybees wove in and out of the empty field, and kudzu vines choked the trees from root to leave, painting the earth envy-green. The only indication of human life came in the form of an overgrown railroad and a line of telephone poles shrinking into the horizon.

 

She chewed open the honey stick and sucked it dry in one go, pinching it between her fingers like a cigarette as she plopped into the bug’s passenger seat. Before them, cracked asphalt snaked into the woods, barely wide enough for two cars to pass one another. Behind them, late afternoon sunlight glinted off a ‘Welcome to Inman’ sign, ‘Population 1,013.’

 

“Pretty sure my high school was bigger than that,” said Mulder between bites of another fig.

 

“Mhm, I bet they all knew your name.”

 

Mulder squinted at her. “What’s that supposed to mean? Enlighten me, Scully. Are you calling me strange?”

                                                   

* * * * *

 

They were one of two occupied rooms in the Rosewood Motel, with two rooms charged to the Bureau and an undersized swimming pool to themselves, in which to escape the heat. Scully sighed in relief as the water folded into her shoulders and slicked her hair to her head. The air was thick, in every sense of the word. Thick on her skin, against her tongue, thick with fog and pollen in her nose and with the incessant hum of insects. That was a funny thing about the South—its sundry congregation of insects never seemed to sleep. Cicadas, crickets, beetles the color of sunlight on tar, fireflies blinking in the musty motel windows—tiny creatures followed them through Inman like spies.  

 

“I talked to the local police chief,” Mulder announced, strolling around the corner with a towel on his arm. “He says that we can meet with him first thing in the morning, and he’ll take us to the crime scenes. They’ll be devoid of any evidence that’ll stand up in court, but maybe we can get an inkling of who—or what—is behind these attacks.”

 

Scully nodded slowly, leaning back into the water. “Do they have continental breakfast?”

 

“Only coffee.”

 

“That’s all I wanted anyway,” she replied lazily.

 

Mulder slid off the concrete, into the pool, and a shiver coursed through his spine. Scully floated toward him. Spotting something rolling between his lips, she narrowed her eyes. What’s that you’re—is that a flower?”

 

Mulder pulled the little flower from his teeth and shared a tiny smile. “Honeysuckle.” He pointed to the bushes on the corner of the motel property. “It’s growing all along there.”

 

“Honeysuckle?”       

 

“Oh,  _Scully_ ,” he pressed his hand to his still-dry chest and heaved a dramatic sigh. He looked positively affronted. “How can you call yourself a Virginian if you’ve never heard of honeysuckle?”

 

“I’ve  _heard_  of it,” she sniffed. “It’s a type of flower, small and tube-like, typically white, with a sweet sap that unlike many flowers is edible to man.” She hesitated before explaining, “my dad used to take me to the butterfly garden. It grew up the walls there, and he’d pick one to suck on while we walked. I just…” she shrugged, “never tried it.”

 

To a child, the plants had looked exotic and poisonous, and having consumed a book of pathology and learned at a young age about the toxic effects of certain plants—especially bright ones—the prospect of sucking the sap from a flower she couldn’t buy at the grocery store had unnerved her.

 

Mulder held her shoulders. “Wait here,” and he hauled himself out of the pool, jogging soaking wet in his swim trunks to the honeysuckle vines, which curled along the edge of the Rosewood property. He plucked a couple of flowers and held them above his head like they were precious china as he got back into the water.       

 

She reached for a flower, but Mulder snatched it away. “Ah-ah.” She arched her eyebrow and crossed her arms. Smirking mischievously, he pinched the flower between his forefinger and thumb, and Scully spotted the first drip of sap at its stem. He held it to her lips. “Open a little,” he ordered.

 

She frowned.

 

“Indulge me, Scully.”

 

She parted her lips, and Mulder’s thumb slid between them, pressing the honeysuckle against her tongue. Drops of sugary syrup rolled down her throat, slightly bitter, so sweet it burned. She swallowed twice, letting the taste linger. Mulder’s finger was still in her mouth. She ran her teeth along it gently.

 

Mulder wiggled his eyebrows and withdrew before placing the second honeysuckle flower between his own lips. “Com’n get it,” he mumbled around the fragile blossom.

 

She glanced around the pool, to the one lit window on the second floor of the Rosewood, to the loose-hinged gate that separated them from the street, to the chain-link fence hidden in honeysuckle. They wouldn’t be caught here.

 

She caught the flower between her teeth and pulled the saccharine liquid from its stem. Kissing him, inhaling chlorine off his skin and tasting honey, Scully remembered every sticky summer of her adolescence. She remembered monarchs mating in the hedges of the butterfly garden, stumbling erratically, erotically through the mist. She remembered spreading peanut butter on Wonderbread with her high school boyfriend and passing it back and forth with a can of cheap beer, licking the peanut butter off his fingers as their legs dangled over the license plate of her dad’s Volkswagen. She remembered that very morning, bleeding her plastic honey-stick dry outside the railroad fruitstand while rental bug puttered raggedly like a hound on its deathbed.

 

She wrapped her legs around Mulder’s waist and bent to kiss his neck, her chin skimming the water. Before she folded herself into his body, she let her eyes sweep about the place, checking one last time for security or suspicious shadows on the lawn. One could never be too careful in their line of work, but despite the occasional rush of a car past the hotel, their spot felt surprisingly secluded—almost abandoned, as if they’d stumbled upon a jungle oasis in the center of a Southern town.

 

Mulder mumbled something husky and incomprehensible before drawing her closer, his erection pressing up against her leg. She smirked, making sure to catch his eye as she shifted so her thigh rubbed along his cock, letting the friction of her skin, his swim trunks, finesse a groan from his lips.

 

She showered him with kisses lighter than butterfly feet, around his lips, his cheeks, his stubbled neck and shoulders. As he shivered, water trembled in his clavicles, and she dipped into the hollows with her tongue. She felt his fingers fiddle with the tie of swimsuit, tugging it free and pulling the slick fabric down to expose her breasts and midriff. She stood on her tiptoes to grant his expert tongue access to pert nipples, gasping into the swampy air.

 

She felt her wetness seep into her suit lining, her sex hot and swollen even in the cool water. It practically throbbed when she reached down to press her fingers against her clit, just to satisfy herself for a moment.

 

“Mulder,” she drew his name into a keen, grinding against him, “let’s make this quick.”

 

He held her waist, tucking her swimsuit lower and lower, slowly exposing her to the sticky gardens of Inman. “Hot and heavy tonight, G-woman?” he quipped, dipping his head underwater to drag his tongue down her belly and tease her into insatiable arousal.

 

“Hot,” she growled, “fast, and—” she jerked down his swim trunks— “rough.”

 

“As you like it, Dr. Scully.”

 

He sat on the pool steps, leaning against the concrete, the tip of his cock out of water, his legs shimmering beneath the surface. She slid onto him, slow at first, hindered by the steps beneath her. Then quicker, the length of him hitching her breath. Her knees dug into the concrete, scraping and scratching underwater as she rode him frantically, never pulling off. He raised his hips to slam into her, and a desperate whine forced its way up her throat. She lowered herself onto his lap completely, for a moment, dragging her fingers along her clit and feeling herself spread wide for him. Riding a wave of pleasure at the thought.

 

Mulder held her upright with one hand, and with the other danced along her breasts, pinched her nipple as sank down him again. Self-consciously, she let her pale breasts bounce in his hand, and Mulder picked up the pace, fucking her furiously, watching her to make sure she was okay with the pace.

 

More than okay, her heady breaths indicated, and verging on an explosive release. She leaned forward, rubbing her clit across his skin in frantic circles, the slightest friction sending her over the edge. Her spine stiffened; she flexed her thighs, her sex clenching and releasing over Mulder’s cock. She tried to muffle her cry, but still a high, undeniable sound escaped her, rising and blending into the wail of cicadas. This would tip him—it always did; if he hadn’t come already, watching her bite her lip and squeeze her eyes shut as the orgasm rocked her and hearing the primal cries he elicited from her chest would send him hurtling.

 

He came moments later, quietly, but his chest rumbled softly. He pulled out as the twitch of his pectorals subsided, and Scully pulled up her suit, ignoring the throb as it rubbed her still-sensitive clit. She climbed fully out of the pool then, letting her fingers linger on the water and sweat that beaded along Mulder’s musculature.

 

“Hurry up and make yourself decent,” she snarked, unsuccessfully hiding the sultry, satiated purr in her voice, “before the proprietors of this fine establishment find us committing a cardinal sin.”

 

“It’s not my fault you sin loudly.”

 

“Do you want them to think your ladylove is a loose woman?”

 

Mulder chuckled. “Oh, but she is.”

 

Scully slapped him with her towel.

 

“And I’m so very grateful for it, too,” he amended.

 

She eyed him appraisingly, stroking her lip with her water-pruned thumb. “Good,” she said at last. She dipped her foot into the pool one last time. Water rippled from her thickened cream, like the slow churn of time in the South.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading, loves!


End file.
